Women are more likely to imagine strangers, men are more likely to imagine women they know than wives, and they would be more willing to make their “hot dreams” come true.
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The American psychiatric classifier uses the expression “abnormal sexual fantasies” in defining sexual desire disorders, while the word “unusual” appears in WHO documents. Psychologists from two academic institutions at the University of Montreal (Canada) felt that this was not enough, and tried to find out which, in fact, erotic fantasies are common and frequent, and which are rare and unusual. The study* was led by Dr. Christian Joyal and the results are published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The online survey included 799 men and 718 women from Quebec, with an average age of 30 years.
They were asked to rate, on a 7-point scale, ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”, 55 statements constructed according to the scheme “I happened to fantasize about …”. If one or another plot received a score of 3 points or more from the respondent, it was believed that he had such a fantasy, this made it possible to judge its prevalence. In addition, the authors separately chose the top “favorite” fantasies, that is, those that received the highest score more often than others.
The “favorite” and at the same time the most frequent fantasy among women turned out to be sex in some special or unusual place, followed by sex with a stranger, and group sex closes the top three. Favorites among men, with a slight difference in numbers, are anal sex, oral sex and fantasies associated with a certain place. Group sex is in fourth place, with the percentage of men who like to imagine such scenes almost equal to the percentage of women. However, they have different ideas about “dream-team” – about the ideal composition of participants in fictional orgies.
Plots related to BDSM, that is, eroticized by violence and pain in a gaming context, are quite widespread. Predictably, women in such scenes prefer submission, men – a dominant role. The question about rape fantasies was not asked directly, but it was asked about forced sex, and its rating is about the same as other imagined BDSM practices.
Among the “atypical” fantasies, that is, those that at least occasionally attend less than 15% of respondents, are sex with a prostitute, humiliation of a partner under the influence of psychoactive substances, “golden rain” (urination on a partner) and sex with dressing up in clothes the other sex.
While there are, of course, gender differences on every point, two are most curious. First, the hero of women’s erotic dreams is either their intimate partner or a stranger, a fictional character. Men are excited by the images of specific women, but not those with whom they actually share the bed, but acquaintances or “stars”. Secondly, men would more often like to realize their fantasies in practice, while women better understand the difference between fictional and real and are not inclined to mix the two layers of existence.
Finally, Christian Joyal himself found the most intriguing fantasies that are common only among men, namely anal sex in the host role, watching a partner who has sex with another man, and sex with a “shemale”, that is, a transgender person with external sexual characteristics and men and women. According to Joyal, these fantasies cannot be explained in terms of evolutionary biology.
* С. Joyal, А. Cossette, and V. Lapierre «What exactly is an unusual sexual fantasy?», The Journal of Sexual Medicine, October 2014.